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If It Were Hearst Instead of Murdoch …

By Clyde Haberman July 21, 2011 8:19 amJuly 21, 2011 8:19 am

Rupert Murdoch, who became a force to reckon with in this city when he bought The New York Post 35 years ago, is routinely compared to a news media titan of the past, William Randolph Hearst. Not that “news media” was a term in vogue in Hearst’s heyday, the early decades of the 20th century. “Press baron” was more like it.

Like Hearst, Mr. Murdoch has used his newspapers to promote the politicians he favors and punish the ones he scorns. As was the case with Hearst’s papers, including The New York American and The New York Evening Journal, those owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation have a curtain between the news-gathering and opinion-writing departments that can be exceedingly diaphanous. Like Hearst, Mr. Murdoch seeks to shape the world around him through his news outlets.

And like Hearst, he has given the news business a thorough — some would say needed — shaking up, albeit at a price, in the form of accusations that he has “debauched journalism,” to borrow a charge that H. L. Mencken aimed at Hearst.

Hearst was “the first publisher to understand that the communications media were potentially more powerful than the parties and their politicians,” the historian David Nasaw has written. Much the same could be said of Mr. Murdoch.

Mr. Nasaw, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, wrote those words in his acclaimed biography of Hearst, “The Chief,” published by Houghton Mifflin in 2000.

Out of curiosity, we sought his thoughts on W.W.W.R.D. — What Would William Randolph Do? How might Hearst have handled the phone hacking and bribery scandals in Britain that have shaken News Corporation to its core and threatened the government of Prime Minister David Cameron?

Appearing on Tuesday before a parliamentary committee, Mr. Murdoch pronounced himself humbled by all that has happened, but he rejected any notion that he bore responsibility for misdeeds committed by newspapers under his dominion. The sins of his underlings could not be visited upon him, he said. The buck stopped elsewhere.

That would have been an alien concept to Hearst, Mr. Nasaw said.

“He made it clear that his newspapers were his newspapers, and he took responsibility for everything that was in them,” the historian said, adding that Hearst “would have been able to defend himself by saying he was the people’s tribune and that the people deserve to know what’s going on.”

Not that Hearst should be mistaken for “a saint or a particularly moral human being,” Mr. Nasaw said. Hardly. He and other press lords of his day “were perfectly capable and believed it their responsibility to use whatever means they could, including bribery and trickery, to get the news.”

But the gap in defining news is vast, he said. Mr. Murdoch’s minions in Britain gleaned tidbits about people like a girl who was murdered or the son of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a boy with cystic fibrosis. Hearst’s troops went after far bigger and more significant game, Mr. Nasaw said.

As an example, he cited how Hearst’s New York American paid two low-level Standard Oil employees to engage in a 1904 equivalent of phone hacking. They rummaged through desks and trash baskets to find letters that would show that the giant oil trust was bribing politicians.

If Hearst had ever been hauled before a committee, Mr. Nasaw said, “he would have said, ‘If the Senate policed its own members and reined in Standard Oil, I wouldn’t have had to do this. So the fault is yours, not mine.’ ”

“He would have taken absolute responsibility, and been proud to take responsibility,” Mr. Nasaw continued, “because he wasn’t reporting on Gordon Brown’s child or the life of a girl or whatever other scandals have erupted.”

“Nothing would have made Hearst happier than to be given a seat before a parliamentary commission so he could explain why he did what he did, and condemn the government for making it necessary for him to do it.”

Here’s what City Room is reading in other papers and blogs this morning.

In a scene reminiscent of “The Great Gatsby,” former Schools Chancellor Cathleen P. Black crashed her sport utility vehicle into a tree in a driveway in the Hamptons after a party. Ms. Black and a passenger were unharmed. [New York Post]

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene warned swimmers and kayakers to stay out of the Hudson River after a four-alarm fire closed a Harlem waste treatment plant, leading the city to pump raw sewage into the river. [Daily News] (Also see The New York Post.)

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